Developing new tools for pasture plant breeding

The rate of genetic gain delivered by forage improvement is a major factor underpinning sustained profitability in pastoral farming. Effective new technologies such as genomic selection have been developed and adopted in animal and crop improvement, but have yet to be developed and deployed in forages. The focus of this paper is on updating New Zealand’s pastoral research community and leading farmers on research supporting development and adoption of genomic selection in perennial ryegrass. This includes a new field-based tool to enable accurate and efficient acquisition of precise phenotypic records for complex economic traits.